Literature needs more Lazarus miracles like Stoner

The new popularity of Stoner, written in 1965 by John Williams and promoted by
Ian McEwan, is the exception rather than the rule. Many great novels are
sadly forgotten

Ian McEwan helped to fuel a surge in sales of Stoner, by John Williams, when he praised the novel on the Today programmePhoto: PHILIP HOLLIS

By John Sutherland

4:08PM BST 13 Jul 2013

It’s not just lottery winners that the great finger in the sky randomly points down at. Sometimes it even happens to novels. On July 5, addressing the nation on the Today programme, the novelist Ian McEwan instructed listeners to pack, along with their swimwear, the novel Stoner – the beach book for 2013. Stoner, “a novel about drugs?”, the two million listeners may idly have thought, before McEwan began his meticulous eulogy: “extraordinary”, “hits at human truths”, “prose as limpid as glass”.

Even though the core of the story is set in Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age, there’s no booze, no flappers, no gangsters. It’s a story about a second-rate English teacher, in a second-rate American university, whose career is a failure, whose marriage and one adultery are a failure, and whose colleagues are glad to be rid of when he dies, prematurely, in post. It’s very like that superb Coen brothers movie, A Serious Man (2009), which, my hunch is, was inspired by Stoner.

John Williams had scant recognition as a novelist during his lifetime. Stoner got respectful reviews when it was published in 1965. “Well-written” was the general verdict. It came, it was read, it was forgotten, like most novels, even the well-written ones. But a few connoisseurs kept some word-of-mouth going.

Literature’s a lottery. But McEwan’s thoughtful intervention is itself thought-provoking. Stoner comes to us in a series aptly called Vintage. Its mission is different from that of, say, Penguin Classics. Vintage is dedicated to the publishing of old books that “deserve to be remembered”: brought up from the deep cellars of literary history, like old wine.

Let’s call it Lazarus literature – in recollection of the dead man Jesus raised from the grave. Where literature is concerned, it’s a mass grave. There are two million novels at least in the vaults of the British Library, growing by 10,000 a year. The dust lies heavily on them.

Who was John Williams? He taught at a respectable American university. He was, as brief obituaries testified, well thought of, but not “stellar”. His contributions to scholarship were minor. But, significantly, he was one of the first teachers of “creative writing”. McEwan, coincidentally, is one of the earliest products of the UK’s pioneer creative-writing programme at the University of East Anglia. The background to Stoner will probably not interest most of those who rushed to order their copies from Amazon on July 5. The orthodoxy in the teaching of literature at university level shifts every 40 years or so, as the dinosaurs give way to the Young Turks. During William Stoner’s career the struggle was between “philology” (English literature studied alongside Latin) and “New Criticism” (close reading, paying attention exclusively to the “words on the page”). Stoner is a philologist – increasingly isolated but dedicated, body and soul, to the books he loves. His PhD topic and one book is on prosody in Chaucer. His courses on medieval literature are dry – but, in their way, passionate. He is at permanent war with the head of his department, who is a new man and a New Critic who malevolently keeps Stoner down, teaching, year after year that unsexiest of courses, “remedial writing” – something normally assigned to “adjunct” teachers. Stoner is finally promoted while he’s lying, cancer-stricken on his deathbed caressing not his unloved wife or daughter (both estranged), but an old, much-loved book. McEwan went out on a limb calling it the finest death scene in literature.

Academic institutional life is small beer. No corridors of power in the ivory tower. But it has its pathos and its martyrs. Williams (of a later generation than his hero, and by affiliation a New Critic) handles it with superb tenderness.

The book came out in the high tide of post-Chatterley permissiveness. The “floodgates” – that favourite image of Mrs Whitehouse – had been thrown open. The public eye was fixated on works such as Last Exit to Brooklyn, whose obscenities, the Bishop of Liverpool (the former cricketer David Sheppard) testified on oath, had for ever “scathed” him, soiling his very soul. The Swinging Sixties were unpropitious for a novel such as Stoner.

It was Orwell who said the only real critic of literature is Time. It winnows out the grain from the chaff. Unfortunately, where novels are concerned, it doesn’t. Novels that “last” typically do so by happenstance. Take, for example, the classic book of our year, 2013, the novel that has done wonders for the sale of silk shirts in Jermyn Street. Have a guess. How much money did The Great Gatsby make for Scott Fitzgerald in his lifetime? Eight thousand dollars (less than the cost of Jay Gatsby’s “custom Duesenberg” automobile). In the last year of Fitzgerald’s life, Gatsby earned its author barely enough to buy him lunch. Fitzgerald was, he said, when he received that last royalty statement, “a forgotten man”.

There then occurred what Fitzgerald critics call the “resurrection”. It was brought about by a fine biography, a good movie starring Alan Ladd (you can see it free on YouTube), and the recruitment of an underground lobby of readers of taste, tirelessly talking the novel up. The Lazarus effect brought Gatsby to where it is now. The same thing happened with Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road three or four years ago. It happens. But not often.

I’m an end-of-career academic. Stoner has a melancholy relevance for me personally. My professional career was blissful – I was paid to read things that other people read for pleasure. I must, I calculate, have read 10,000 novels. Each a little literary love affair.

What five would top my list of books to be brought up from the cellar? If I had the McEwan-Lazarus touch, I’d point to the following (of many): Jezebel, Irène Némirovsky, 1936 (an exquisite study of the pains of midlife loss of beauty); Cockfighter, Charles Willeford, 1962 (American grit, allegorised in the most violent of American “sports”); Peter Ibbetson, George Du Maurier, 1891 (a charming British stab at what Proust was doing in Á la recherche du temps perdu); The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa, 1991 (teasing demonstration of the impossibility of writing books, while writing one); Sardines, Nuruddin Farah, 1981 (powerfully written roman à thèse, or didactic novel, about the horrors of female genital mutilation, decades before the Western media got aroused by the atrocity).

John Sutherland’s ‘How to be Well Read’, a round-up of 623 novels, will be published by Random House in November